stuff and nonsense

Horton Plaza Mall, San Diego, California, 1985.

Anyway guess whos 18 now!!!

I think we're all pretty familiar with the male gaze. Lots of skin, tits and ass, that sort of thing.

The female gaze has been debated, but it looks something like a sexy college professor or himbo househusband.

What OFMD S2 absolutely nails is the queer gaze.

Look at this man.

An absolutely beautiful man. Who wears crop tops and leather pants. Long hair up in a messy bun. He's wearing eyeliner. And pearls.

And here.

Drawn on facial hair. Spaulders. Bracers. Fishnet sleeves. A MOTHERFUCKING MULLET.

These badasses.

The teeth and chains. SO MUCH MAKEUP. Big fancy coat with nothing underneath. Glam met goth and fucked out these looks.

And THE SWEDE!

Cropped jacket. Ponytail. Asymmetrical button fly. Decorative chains (again).

All of this screams queer. If I saw any of these people in a bar I'd be like "Yep, one of us." The gender fuckery of it all. The feminine and the masculine all thrown in together in perfect combinations. Decoration for its own sake. Jewelry and flashy adornment and gorgeous peacockery.

And we love it. The fandom is going absolutely feral over these looks, these actors, as we very well should. There is not a single member of this cast who has not had beautiful art lovingly made depicting them.

Fuck the male gaze, fuck the female gaze. Give me the queer gaze. Give me queer creators making queer media for queer audiences and absolutely nailing it. These people are not at all what Hollywood usually thinks sexy looks like, yet we want to devour every one of them. This is what queer beauty looks like. What queer sex appeal looks like. What queer desire looks like.

It just perfectly captures that wonder and surprise and joyfulness of being in love for the first time, and realising that you can suddenly use words like 'boyfriend' and they mean something tangible to you - testing out the language and definitions of your relationship for the first time and being absolutely giddy with it all.

And the fact that it's two middle aged men, who have both been on their own specifically queer journeys, gives it a whole other layer of meaning and importance.

As queer people, so many of us were denied the opportunity to have these experiences when we were kids; standing on the sidelines and watching our peers go through all these rites of passage, whilst never quite able to reach out and touch it ourselves. And I think many of us live in perpetual fear that because we didn't to get to have this as kids, then we've missed out, and we will never get the chance to have those experiences in the same way.

But it isn't too late.

My mum came out as gay at 50, and I watched her go through the same thing when she met her first ever girlfriend (who is now her wife): the absolute excited youthful joy of being in love and getting to do all the things she never got a chance to do when she was younger. As a twenty year old, I was a bit annoyed and embarrassed by my mum suddenly turning into a lovesick teenager, but looking back on it now as a thirty-something, it actually makes me well up slightly thinking about how absolutely beautiful it was.

And that's why the 'boyfriend' moment puts me in such an emotional headspace. Because what this silly show did was cup my face gently in its hands and say 'it's never too late to have this'.

I'm so, so glad that we have so much representation for younger queers these days; that young queers get to see themselves represented on screen, having all these experiences that every young person deserves to have. But it's so much rarer for us to see older queers represented in this way, too. Older queers getting to have this is so important, and watching these two men in their 40s experience this, being allowed to revel in the giddy joy of first love - omg we're boyfriends! - like the happy lovesick teenagers they thought they'd forever lost the chance to be, it's just everything to me.

After ANY thrilling and/or happy experience, it's very possible for your brain to quite literally run out of the proteins and vitamins you need to make more happy chemical. People get dopamine crashes anywhere from a couple hours to a couple weeks after abormal but exciting events - whether it's a really good day, they did a lot of socializing, had a lot of fun hyperfocusing on a project, had an intense sexy time experience, a huge performance they were excited for, a date, a day at a theme part, etc etc etc.

Your brain goes into overdrive coming up with !!!!!!!! chemicals to keep up with your environment, then -especially if that was an abnormal experience or if you don't have the !!!!!! chemicals in excess very often- then you just run out for a while.

You can remedy this by finding other things that will be good, but not expect the !!!!! along with it. Instead of something you really really like doing, find something simple and calm and comforting. Snuggle with a friend and watch a movie, pet a cat, write a letter, etc.

Definitely get some vitamin d, chocolate if you can / like it, and take a multivitamin. Protein is important for regrowth and restocking, so get plenty of that too to bounce back quickly!

LIKE….

THATS WHY AFTER THE EXCITEMENT WEARS OFF FROM ME DOING LITERALLY ANYTHING THAT MAGKES ME “!!!!” I JUST FEEL BLEH AND IMMEDIATELY CRAVE *THING* AGAIN

SO IM NOT JUST BROKEN

ME AFTER MY FRICKING GAY BOOKCLUB WHERE I SEE ALL MY FRIENDS ONCE A MONTH

OR AFTER WATCHING AN EPISODE OF THE SHOW IM HYPERFIXATED ON

I think it's very important that we have feel-good shows like Heartstopper. A few years back, a tv show about two queer boys in high school would be unthinkable. But its plot generally revolves around explaining queerness. Sure, it's nice. It's definitely the show I would watch with my family if I were a teenager and wanted to come out again (I had to watch glee with my mom to do that. not optimal). It's the show where teenagers find love and themselves, but sexuality is constantly discussed, explained, sanitized. It's the show straight people will watch. And that's good. We do need shows like that.

But Our Flag Means Death doesn't even bother trying. It's a show about mostly middle aged people, most of them not white, most of them queer in one way or the other. It's really a game of spot the hetero, like someone said. And the characters are not sublte about it. They have sex for fun, something most characters don't have in tv shows, definitely not queer characters. They make dick jokes. They are not all conventionally attractive and they know it, and the writing doesn't care. They are all people before they are queer representation.

Stede's storyline in s1 is in a part about discovering himself and his sexuality, but it's not obnoxiously repeated. Instead, it's played in a natural way. Stede's storyline is ALL about finding himself, yet it's not just about that. Just like Ed's storyline, it's about toxic masculinity and allowing himself to have fine things and self-hatred and finding his place in a world, something most of us can relate to. Hell, none of us were even sure the main characters were going to kiss and end up together, we were all so sure it's a queerbait. But this show doesn't bait its audience. It's not afraid of weirdness. It embraces it instead. There is a nonbinary character. No, they are not a mermaid. Call them jim. That's it. Yes, Lucius and Pete got engaged. Everyone there knows what mateolage is, congrats. Olu and Jim never break up and then Archie shows up, then Zheng, and we all know. We all know.

Two men nearing fifty have a deep, romantic moment where one of them appears as a mermaid, and it's treated as the profound scene it is without ridiculing it. This would never fly in a 'mainstream' media. It would have to be downplayed. Here, it saves Ed's life.

The show tells you racists suck, but it doesn't tell you in a condescending, finger-waving way catered to the white people. Instead, it sets your ship aflame and burns you alive, runs a knife through your hand, puts poison in your drink and kills you.

This is a show for adults, for queer people of all kinds, and it does not give a fuck if anyone else gets it. It's so rare to find a tv show that caters to us, yet alone a tv show that's genuinely good and caring and so well loved.

This is a show that basically straightbaited its audience in the first season, that's how much they don't care.

but no one ever talks about the life's blood of tumblr: GIFSETS.

Tumblr has longevity because it is the gifset website. A movie trailer drops and within an hour there are already multiple gifsets. Just there reminding us this movie is coming out it looks pretty good. A tumblr user thinks: I wish I had memory box containing every facial expression and movement made by Colin Firth in that 5 hour mini series of Pride and prejudice and some other tumblr user devotes their life to making that happen. Some dead guy has a birthday and a tumblr user gifs every single one of his dozens of films and puts them in a single gifset just because it makes fans of the dead guy happy.